


Nocturnes

by newsbypostcard



Series: Getting Sentimental [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Music, Piano
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-14 23:53:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13601124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: The rumour goes: If you're in the city and you listen closely in the middle of the night, you can hear piano music pouring out of Stark Tower.





	Nocturnes

**Author's Note:**

> This work has been a draft for about a year and I finally just knocked it out. Yay!

  


  


The rumour goes: If you're in the city and you listen closely in the middle of the night, you can hear piano music pouring out of Stark Tower.

Sam hears the rumours about it and smiles—a private joy, directed to the floor, his hands shoved in his pockets in humility. The comments are kind, acclaim mild but universal: Tony Stark can play a mean piano.

But it's not Stark playing. He hasn't played in years.

"Huh?" Stark said, half-buried in robotics when Sam had asked him about the impossibly gorgeous grand in the corner of the atrium. "Oh, that old thing. It was my—" Then he'd stopped, eyes sliding out of focus. "It was my mother's." He went back to screwing something in or out of whatever he was building. "Cost me a fortune to move around all these years. Needs tuning at least; hell, probably needs replacing—"

"Don't you dare," Sam said, before he'd known it.

Stark looked up, intrigued. "You play, Wilson?"

"Kind of," Sam said, and then winced at his own bullshit. "Used to. Guess I'm out of practice."

Tony'd looked from the piano to Sam, and then back to his mess of wires. "Decorative. Sentimental, you could say. Haven't sat down to it in years."

"Well, it's beautiful. You gotta know it's a piece of art in itself."

"It's yours. Will it fit in your house? If not I'll have it moved downstairs. Either way I'll call my piano guy."

Sam stared, sure he'd misunderstood. "What? _What_? I'm sorry, what do you—"

"Better it gets used. If you can put music back into my mom's old piano—" Tony stopped; his hands stopped working. He seemed to freeze in place. "She'd like that," he finished haltingly, and then finally glanced up. "You'd be doing me a favour. You want me to beg?"

Sam hadn't known what else to say, but a few days later, there it was: that gorgeous piano, three floors down, tuned and restored. Sam would swear it shone like stars.

He spent the first day staring at it from ten feet away, afraid to even touch it. Now, on the second day, he's at least deigned to get within two feet of it. He circles it as though checking for flaws, or maybe for teeth. Stark's wealth has never bothered him before, but this seems to be a bridge too far.

"This is absurd," Sam tells the piano.

The piano doesn't answer. The only sound the piano can make will have to follow from his hands.

The other Avengers seem excited by it too, albeit in a much different way than Sam. _They're_ willing to touch it—will glance their filthy hands atop the thing, some of them with appropriate reverence but more of them careless and crass. Sam fights the urge to be defensive of his baby, but given that he can't even get near the thing, his protectiveness might be said to be coming from kind of a weird place.

"Why'd Stark bring it here?" Natasha asks. She plinks out a few notes of _Heart and Soul_. Sam's own heart and soul wither where he stands. 

"Maybe Stark wants to lead a sing-along," says Clint.

"Let's hope not," Maria says. Natasha removes her fingers from the keys and Sam breathes a sigh of relief.

"Don't think he plays anymore," offers Steve. He's eating an orange. He's always eating something. The acids on his fingers better not find their way onto his piano. "Think it used to be his mom's. She sounds like a pretty nice lady."

"Don't sound so surprised," says Clint.

"Well," Steve says around an orange slice. "You didn't know Howard."

"Maybe Stark's gonna start up again," Clint suggests.

"You sound like you're gunning for this," Maria says. "You jonesing for a sing-along, Barton?"

"I've been known to enjoy a little campfire kumbaya."

"Is that right?"

"Please stop touching the piano like it's a dog," Sam says, unable to take it anymore. "That is one unfathomably beautiful instrument, and you're all just fondling it like it's some kind of—"

But the rest is lost to surprised exclamations, and so Sam is subjected to an hour of interrogation on the care and feeding of grand pianos.

  


  


  


He never says he plays, but nobody asks, either. Sam wonders if Steve had something to do with that.

Eventually they manage to leave the beauty alone, and then it's just Sam and his piano again. The room goes still. Sam pulls out the cloth he's been carrying in his pocket for exactly this reason and finally does touch it, if only to clean it of wretched fingerprints.

That turns it for him. In the dark of the Manhattan night, on the fifty-first floor, Sam finally grasps that he must have done something good enough to somehow deserve this. It's not like he's never had a piano before; his parents had gone without for months to buy him an old, used upright for his tenth birthday when it became clear the piano thing was gonna stick. He'd loved that damn thing with his entire being. Some notes fell flat within weeks of being tuned, but through middle school, then high school, then every break in his first years of university he'd sat down at that bench and known it was just him and that beautiful machine. The rest of the world just fell away.

Then he got politically involved, started dating seriously. Stayed in Baltimore over holidays. Knew his ROTC scholarship was gonna take him away from home soon enough. He played a few times a year, delighted girlfriends with his hidden abilities when they passed a piano in a bookshop or street corner in the summer; but for the most part, music stopped being important. 

His mother moved, and sold his piano. He bought an electric keyboard, an expensive one, years ago, but it wasn't the same.

This thing is—in a league of its own. He can't even imagine what it cost. At—what—thirty? forty? years old, it's in perfect condition. Not even any scuffs that Sam can see—

Oh, God. He's gotta stop thinking about this thing like it's a car. It's meant to be played. This whole thing started because he knew how criminal it was for a beauty like this to sit untouched, as an expensive ornament. And yet now that it's here—

He accidentally presses the cloth down too hard over the keys.

Notes sing, sonorous, discordant in the clash of tones. Sam withdraws his hand as though he's been burned. The sound cuts off at once—yet it sounds ever still in the instrument's chest, or else in his mind, filling the room. 

It's warm in here, now. Or he is.

"Christ." He wipes his hands furiously in the cloth, then throws it to the floor, sliding onto the piano bench before he can think twice. His foot finds the sustaining pedal as though it'd never left, the chords out of his fingers before he's even quite settled. Just like that, the dam is broken. He shuts his eyes and plays aimlessly, letting his hands find the song; doesn't even quite recognize what he's settled on at first. Memory's etched in his muscles that deep. The hands remember; the instrument knows. His brain catches up later on—one of Chopin's _Nocturnes_ , it must be. Something picked up in his last year of high school and practiced to death over months until his mother smacked him with an oven mitt and beseeched him for silence.

It's probably right he chose this. Something sinks in him as he plays; a calm, but different. A melancholy settling, deep in his bones.

He takes his fingers off the keys. A good while later, he takes his foot off the pedal.

"Sounds nice."

Sam smiles, or doesn't quite. He'd known Steve was there and kept playing anyway. "Yeah," he says, running hand along its housing. This creature is familiar to him now, an extension of himself, no longer to be avoided. "It's a hell of a thing."

Steve pushes off from the doorframe, hands stuffed humbly in his pockets, and slides onto the bench beside him. "I meant you."

"I know you did."

Steve waits as Sam stares at the thing, trying to figure out where his feelings are at. Then, hunched over on the bench like a much smaller man, Steve reaches forward and plays a frankly adorable rendition of _Yankee Doodle_ with one hand.

Sam smiles. It'd be hard not to. "Wow," he deadpans. "Thought you didn't have a musical bone in your body."

"That's just muscle memory," Steve says, and it's hard to argue with that.

"Pretty good."

"More than a year with the USO," he sighs, "and that might be the only useful skill I picked up."

"Yankee Doodle."

Steve winces. "Yeah, that nickname stuck with me a while."

Sam laughs, and then another wave of hilarity hits him until he's left doubled-over and wiping a tear from his eye. "Yeah, I'll bet it did."

They sit in silence a while, legs flush together. Whatever mournful feeling had settled is gone now, turned into something new.

"I didn't tell them," Steve says. "But I think they figured it out."

"Yeah," Sam says. "Figure it's a matter of time."

"Why keep it a secret? I mean, talent like yours—"

But he stops when Sam shakes his head. "It's not for them," he says quietly, and maybe Steve understands. He nods, at least, and lets it drop. 

"You don't have to play for me," Steve says, "but I like it when you do."

"That's because I'm trying to seduce you when I play for you."

Steve grins, sly. "Is that right?"

Sam puts his fingers to the keys again and starts playing anew, a Nocturne in a major key, and Steve lasts an impressive amount of time until finally he grabs Sam's wrist with a resigned sound and throws his leg over Sam's lap, making out with him right there on the bench, both of them laughing when Sam starts to play around him and fumbles the notes.

Sam doesn't mind that Stark gets the credit. He doesn't care that the rest of the tower knows who it is and just doesn't say it. All he cares about are those private moments where he closes his eyes and lets the music carry him—lets himself glide, his fingers at the keys, Steve's fingers at his skin while the melodies soar.

  


  



End file.
